Gimme Fiction

Are you a stupid parent interested in embarrassing your child? Why not follow in the footsteps of Robert Edwards, who complained that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—a novel that his seventeen-year-old son was reading in English class at Lawrence Park Collegiate—was “rife with brutality towards and mistreatment of women (and men at times), sexual scenes, and bleak depression” and contained “profane language” and an unfair treatment of Christianity. Edwards filed a formal complaint with the Toronto District School Board in December, telling the Star he was “looking for justification as to why this is an appropriate book,” even though the novel’s Wikipedia page would have mostly taken care of that job for him. And now, the Star is reporting today that Edwards’ formal complaint to the Toronto District School Board was roundly rejected by the board’s book review panel—they’re “very supportive” of keeping Atwood’s Tale in the classroom.